The Man With the Golden Arm (36 page)

‘I got to get a lib’ry card myself,’ Frankie determined.

That was only one of several matters he had to tend to right away. Another was the business of getting a job on the legit so that he could break clean with Zosh instead of running off like some sneaking punk. He was going to start on that the minute he finished his shot – he finished it. And was right on the verge of getting up to look up a certain name in the telephone directory five feet from where he sat – a name that had been told to him once, right in here, of a party who could put a man to work on the drums with or
without a union card. But just at that moment he noticed that Antek’s glasses had been broken while he’d been gone. ‘What happened to the goggles, Owner?’ he asked urgently, needing to know the answer right away.

Antek made no reply. He felt he was being razzed and walked off with the string tied over one ear and knotted to the stump of the glasses’ frame. Antek suffered occasional defeats, and these humiliated him more deeply than blows.

His deaf-and-dumb cat had also, it seemed, come under fire. She came gimping across the floor on three legs and somebody’s hound, on a leash, made a run for her. Antek’s wife, holding the leash, let the hound go just far enough to make the old cat scramble for it on all threes.

‘The old cat’s no good,’ Mrs Owner explained herself righteously, ‘she’s the one what trampled her young ones to deat’ – somebody ought to give it to her good for that.’

A dull compassion for all old cats hit Frankie. ‘She did it to make room for her next litter,’ he told the woman. So just to show everyone how she felt she hollered, ‘Get her, Bummy!’ and let the leash go altogether. The old cat barely made it, half crawling and half slipping up the piled beer cases to safety.

And the old bums drooled and drooled.

Frankie turned away. It seemed that everything that ever happened to him had begun with some hound or other’s aimless yapping.

Outside the traffic warnings flashed from red to green and back again. In the bar mirror he saw the door open and Sparrow wander in pretending he wasn’t looking for anyone in particular. Then just happen to spot an old buddy who hadn’t been around for a while.

‘Hi, Dealer,’ he sounded Frankie out from the front of the bar, signaling to Antek for two shots. Frankie let his shot stand before him without even acknowledging that he’d seen anyone come in.

But out of the corner of his eye, turned toward the mirror, he studied the punk as never before. So this was the joker for whom he’d done nine months in County. ‘He left me holdin’ the bag for sure that time,’ Frankie reminded himself firmly; so that he’d never, never weaken.

Sparrow leaned over the bar to Antek, whispered confidentially, and a minute later Antek ambled down toward Frankie with a far too casual air.

‘He wants to talk to you,’ Antek reported, ‘somethin’ about gettin’ back on the door by Schwiefka. Says you got him awfully wrong about somethin’.’

‘If a guy wants a job by Schwiefka,’ Frankie said loudly enough for the punk to hear, ‘let him go by Schwiefka. I don’t run no joint, I’m just dealin’.’

Antek, duty done, reported back to Sparrow and the punk picked up his courage at last. Catching Frankie’s eye in the mirror, he asked, in a small peaked voice, ‘You still got them hard feelin’s, Dealer?’

‘I got no kind of feelin’s.’

‘It wasn’t no sense
bot
’ of us gettin’ busted, Frankie.’

‘No sense at all,’ Frankie agreed readily. ‘Who’s arguin’?’ Frankie certainly wasn’t. It was all over and done so far as Dealer was concerned. He turned on the stool, leaving the shot the punk had bought him with his last two bits, and brushed past him to the door.

Sparrow plucked pleadingly at Frankie’s sleeve. ‘Let me talk to you, Frankie.’

Frankie looked down at him. The punk was looking shabby all right. And a bad time of year for dog stealing. ‘There’s lots of things I got wrong awright,’ he told the punk, ‘but you ain’t one of ’em. You’re the one thing I’m real right about.’

He turned up his jacket against the evening cold and left without looking back.

Each morning now the tide of his loneliness rose, to ebb only when he took his evening place in the slot. To rise a bit higher, by the following morning, than it had the morning before. If it hadn’t been for the punk, it somehow seemed, he’d be on the legit now somewhere with Molly instead of still hustling suckers all night long. His eyes, under the night-light, no longer reflected the light.

It’s all in the wrist, with a deck or a cue; yet the fingers had lost the touch. The feel of the deck wasn’t there any more. And it had all been better before.

He practiced squeezing a sponge ball one evening. ‘Tunney stren’thened his hands like this,’ he explained to Sophie. And fancied the fingers felt stronger.

He gave the sports a shaky deal three nights running. On the fourth he settled down. Till, toward morning, one sport sat with a low straight and three others drew to two pairs. The second player’s final card slipped face upward, matching the pair of sixes already showing on the board. Frankie reddened and gave the others theirs face upward too, with a mumbled ‘sorry’ to the one whose hand he had so clumsily betrayed, a youth known to him only as Bird Dog.

Four players turned up their cards with real relief; the dealer had saved them money from home. But Bird Dog shoved the pot toward Frankie.

‘You won this one, Dealer,’ Bird Dog assured him, slapping his corduroy hat against the flat of his hand to indicate he was casing out, and tossed two bits of his own into the pot. ‘You win that too.’

‘Take your money, Bird Dog,’ Frankie begged off, ‘it’s yours.’

‘No hard feelings,’ the boy assured him with a flat little laugh. Everyone watched him leave while Frankie boxed the deck, pretending it had all been the fault of the cards, and
opened a fresh deck. The pot stayed in the middle for the next hand’s winner.

His palms were sweating and the deck, that had always slipped so lightly, seemed half glued to them. On the very first go-round with the fresh deck he dealt a card to the missing player’s empty seat and the cards had to be shifted all around the board. Schwiefka put his hand on Frankie’s arm with a meaningful touch.

‘Go down ’n get a drink, Dealer. You’re dealin’ like you got hairs in your teet’. I fired one guy awready who could deal that good.’

Frankie shoved back the chair, slapped on his cap, and all the way to the door fancied small laughter behind him.

And right in the downstairs doorway, just as though he didn’t know he’d ever been fired, the punk was waiting again. ‘How long you been waitin’ for nothin’?’ Frankie wanted to know. A cold wind came down the alley and the punk blew on his hands.

‘A long time, Frankie. Get me my job back. I’m broke.’

‘You always were,’ Frankie reminded him.

When he reached the Tug & Maul Sparrow hustled in right behind him and stood watching while Frankie ordered a double shot for himself. His right hand was shaking so that he had to lift the glass with his left. Anybody’s hand would shake, having a punk shadow him all night. The punk must be practicing to be a Pinkie again. He kept the hand in his pocket. He had two doubles before it stopped trembling.

‘You got a loose crowd up there tonight, Frankie?’ The punk sounded homesick all right. ‘You got to get back up there right away?’

‘I don’t
got
to go nowheres right away.’

When Frankie ordered a third double shot Sparrow sensed that something had gone wrong in the slot. Frankie stuck to coffee between shifts when things were going as they should.

‘Ain’t you goin’ back upstairs all night, Frankie?’ And felt a faint little twinge of hope that, just maybe, Frankie had been fired too.

‘Not tonight ’r any night. Nobody’s stairs. I’m gonna try downstairs awhile.’ The hand was fine now, steady as a die. ‘I’m gonna find out what’s doin’ in the basement.’

‘You still got rent to pay,’ Sparrow reminded him meekly.

Frankie turned on him. ‘It looks to me like you’re fallin’ behind in yours,’ he accused the punk, looking him up and down from the worn shoes and the pants so thin at the knees to the coat that had once been old Stash’s: it still bore the marks of an ice tongs faintly visible across the left shoulder. ‘You look like Vi has fired you too,’ he threw in.

‘I’ll get my own racket.’ Sparrow tried, at the last possible moment, to salvage something of his pride.

‘It’s pretty cold for rollin’ stiffs,’ Frankie observed.

Sparrow saw then it was no use; no use at all. He wasn’t even good for a shot with Frankie any more.

‘What’s yours?’ Sparrow really wanted to know. ‘What’s yours?’

And didn’t stay for an answer.

Frankie saw his tattered coat catch in the door as it closed behind him, then the punk extricated himself and was gone into the November night. ‘It was toward this time of year I first hooked up with him,’ Frankie remembered with a heart homesick for many Novembers.

Owner came up with the bottle. ‘On the house,’ he told Frankie, and poured evenly for both the dealer and himself. Frankie shoved a half dollar toward Antek. He wasn’t so hard up as some people seemed to think.

‘See that sign of yours?’ he asked, pointing to one of the bar legends:

‘Well,’ Frankie told Owner, ‘my cow’s dead too. So don’t gimme none of
your
bull. Just give me a square count on
my
change.’ And spat, slowly and provocatively, making a great show of the act, between his knees and down to the floor at his feet.

Antek was hurt. He’d only been trying to patch things up between a couple old buddies and this was what he got. He withdrew the bottle and his own glass, returned with change for the half dollar and said, ‘Suit yourself, Dealer.’

Then spat, just as slowly, just as provocatively, between his own feet.

‘You call
that
spittin’?’ Frankie laughed with a huge contempt, hawked once and blew a beautiful round gob straight over the bar to splash across the mirror where the photographs of Antek’s wife and daughter hung in gilt-edged frames. Antek picked up a sodden bar towel and slung it straight into Frankie’s face.

Frankie wiped his face absent-mindedly with the rag precisely as though it had been handed to him politely for just that purpose.

‘After all, Frankie,’ Antek apologized in all humility, ‘a bartender got feelin’s too.’ Then saw that Frankie was crying.

Antek watched this spectacle a minute, figuring something slowly to himself. Frankie handed him back the towel.

‘I’ll say this much about somethin’ that’s none of my business at all,’ Antek told him, measuring each word as though fearing to say one word too many. ‘I think you’re dead wrong about the punk. That’s all.’ And turned away.

So it really had been Pig – and the punk had been right in guessing that it had been Owner who’d given Pig ‘some kind of count’ on Louie’s roll. Then his pride came up to
deny flatly what all his senses had told him at last. If he’d been wrong this long he’d just stay wrong. If the punk had gone, let him go. Let everyone, let all of them go.

It was too hard to get slapped in the teeth with a wet bar towel twice in a row.

He didn’t tell Sophie of his determination to quit Schwiefka. Why hang on? He didn’t even tell Schwiefka. The whole day following the night of the shaky deal he lay on the bed waiting for the old strength to return, in a single jump, to his wrists. He lay fully clothed, with his cap in easy reach of his hand; as though in order to be ready to go back to work the moment the touch returned.

But the feel of the deck had died with the light that had died in his eyes, leaving only a loneliness that was a loneliness for more than any lost skill.

More than a loneliness for careless nights when he and the punk had first gone on drunks together. More even than the gnawing need for Molly-O.

A loneliness that took on substance and form, like a crouching man wearing some sort of faded, outworn uniform.

He was lonely all right. He was lonely for his old buddy with the thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.

Neither Sophie nor Sergeant McGantic wanted him to practice at the board any more. She sat by the window and McGantic roamed the long, cold hall. It had been some hours since she had spoken. It had been some time since McGantic had called.

But toward the end of the afternoon she began telling him of all the things he had missed when he’d been gone. She had seen a movie about ‘Jack London in the Klondikes’ and another wherein Joan Crawford had changed hats without a change of scene. ‘I’m gonna write to
Screenland
about that,’
she threatened to snitch on Joan, ‘they pay five bucks fer movie boners they call them.’

She never wrote. But had added several morbid memories to the five-and-dime loose-leaf volume, her
Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence.
Yet there were long hours between them now when the book lay open on her lap and she had no word to say.

As if realizing at last that there was really nothing for her to do in the world. No true place of her own at all. Nothing to do but to wait. For what? For the booby hatch or a miracle, she didn’t much care which.

‘Why don’t Vi come to see me no more, just to say, “How you feelin’?” like she used?’ she suddenly demanded to know.

‘She’s havin’ trouble with the punk is why,’ he answered, not knowing himself just what he meant. ‘Vi is up to somethin’,’ he guessed indifferently and let it go at that.

Thus Sophie knew, more clearly with each hour, what she had so long suspected: that they were all in secret league against her. Violet and Frankie, Owner and Jailer, just the same as they’d been before Frankie had gone away; the overnight guests and creaky old Pin Curls down the fourth floor rear who played, over and over, just to get Sophie’s goat, the same old creaking tune:

‘You only make the same mistake once,’ she advised him abruptly.

‘Whatever that means,’ he answered mechanically.